'So long passwords,' Google tells all 3 billion users — here's why.
Your Google accounts are at risk — that much should be obvious. The Company has repeatedly warned Gmail and its other users to update the security on their accounts. To add passkeys. But for some reason, these warnings are not landing as they should.
, and it’s fueled by “transnational crime groups who seek to exploit vulnerable people online for financial gain.” This includes theThe threats are also getting worse. “57% of adults experienced a scam in the past year, with 23% reporting money stolen," and now “scammers are increasingly misusing AI tools to efficiently scale and enhance their schemes.”Almost all these attacks focus on accessing your accounts — Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon or any one of hundreds of banks and financial institutions. Whether it’s a phishing email, a malicious text, a phantom hacker call or a rogue ClickFix pop-up. The target is almost always the same. “Enter your username and password here.”” warning in 2023. It’s advice is clear. Stop using passwords and switch to passkeys. And do that now. Asputs it, “Google is telling users to change their passwords, but not because of a breach that exposed them. In fact, Google’s real advice is to stop using your password altogether.” “When you use a passkey to sign in to your Google Account, it proves to Google that you have access to your device and are able to unlock it," the company says. "Together, this means that passkeys protect you against phishing and any accidental mishandling that passwords are prone to, such as being reused or exposed in a data breach.” Even when Google is forced to correct misreporting after claims that millions of Gmail password suddenly leaked, it still confirms that “adopting passkeys is a stronger and safer alternative to passwords.” Again this week, the latest reported collation of breached username and password data But still, whenever articles push users to stop using passwords, skeptics respond as if this is controversial. It is not. And Google is not alone., removing them completely from accounts. “If a user has both a passkey and a password,” the company says, “and both grant access to an account, the account is still at risk for phishing.”Google doesn’t go that far, but does say “we allow you to skip not only the password but also 2SV when you use a passkey. In fact, passkeys are strong enough that they can stand in for security keys for users enrolled in our Advanced Protection Program.” Google also says that adding passkeys means they will “pay closer attention to the sign-ins that fall back to passwords,” In other words, they’ll tighten your account security. Google is leading the charge on passkey adoption, with areport shows exactly how critical it is to short up Gmail and other email security, as “cybercriminals target Outlook and Gmail, evading standard email security.” These platforms are the prime target, almost all credential harvesting phishing attacks targeting one or the other, on a broadly even split..” The team analyzed 1.8 billion emails processed over the last 3 months, of which “about 234 million as spam. Compared with the same period last year, that’s the same number processed but 26 million more harmful emails, an increase of 13%.” Given that 90% of those attacks “targeted wither Outlook or Gmail,” VIPRE says “this indicates that attackers are prioritizing access to the two largest business and personal email ecosystems and hoping to save time in the process.”, “threat actors exploit trusted sender sources and infrastructure to slip past standard email defenses.” This refers to are the types of attacks that have generated headlines in recent months, where legitimate infrastructure is exploited to help shore up the seeming legitimacy of an attack. “ Each time we have seen this kind of attack, often exploiting Google’s expansive ecosystem, the company reinforces that warning to move away from a reliance on passwords to protect accounts. It’s just not safe to do so given current threats., Google already “commands half of all passkey authentication activity measured in our dataset,” and “its sheer volume dwarfs that of other platforms, and it functions as an SSO provider that users authenticate through to access numerous other domains, making direct comparisons misleading.” Google’s market-leading approach is laudable. “The numbers tell a remarkable story of acceleration,” Dashlane says. “Google passkey authentications exploded by 352% over the past year, driven by a pivotal product decision: In October 2023, Google made passkeys the default login option for personal Google Accounts. This move effectively exposed hundreds of millions of users to passwordless authentication, creating the largest real-world deployment of passkeys to date.”But it’s not all good news — far from it. NordPass tells me that its research into the security and password protection on “the 1,000 most visited websites in the world” paints a bleak picture. It found that “39% offer single sign-on , and Google dominates — powering 9 out of 10 SSO options.” That means that if your Google username and password is compromised and hasn’t been supplanted by stronger security, it’s more than your Google account at risk. NordPass says “up to 86% of all basic web application attacks use stolen credentials for initial access,” and “the average user has around 170 passwords.” Just like Google, NordPass says “passkeys are the answer. Backed by the FIDO Alliance, passkeys are the modern solution to the password problem.” It warns that “bad password habits don’t just recur out of user convenience — in fact, the websites themselves push users to take the easier way out by not enforcing strict password requirements and supporting weak credential use.” "The web is in the midst of a monumental shift that will make the digital lives of billions of users easier and more secure with passkeys,” says Google’s Christiaan Brand. But that only happens if the rest of its account holders secure their accounts. Do that today.
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